Preview: Justice Not Politics

Preview: Justice Not Politics

October 10, 2012

On this week’s Moyers & Company (check local listings), James Balog, one of the world’s premier cinemaphotographers, explains how “the earth is having a fever.” At tremendous risk to his own safety, Balog has been documenting the erosion of glaciers in Switzerland, Greenland, Iceland, and Alaska. He joins Bill to share his photos and discoveries, describing his process and transformation from climate change skeptic to true believer. Balog’s soon-to-be-released film, Chasing Ice, is a breathtaking account of climate change in action.

Afterward, Bill explores a judicial system under partisan attack. Thirty-eight states now elect their high court judges. Over the last decade, $200 million — much of it secret and tied to partisan agendas — has poured into these judicial campaigns. In Florida, Pennsylvania, and Iowa, for example, justices are being targeted by radical groups that abhor judicial independence and want the courts to reflect their own political biases.

In Iowa, a state whose judicial system has been praised for its fairness and impartiality, the political and religious Right ousted three justices in 2010 over marriage equality, and is now trying to take down a fourth over the same issue. But this time a bipartisan coalition called Justice Not Politics is fighting back. Its co-founders — Democrat Sally Pederson and Republican Joy Corning, each of whom served Iowa for eight years as lieutenant governor — talk with Bill about what’s at stake when justices are at the mercy of partisan passions and money in politics.

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I couldn’t agree more about separating politics and money from the judicial system. …And i agree with the generality about global warming as well, but would hope that a comprehensive look at the “evidence” would do a comprhensive job at separating what is “known” about global climate change from what is “known” about anthropoligic influences on global climate change. …Seems to me that a bunch of pundits and politicikers are anxious to point fingers to wherever it might support their own investments, …but are nearly incapable of coming together to warn “people” of what is the likely course of natural global climate change, and how they should prepare for it. …For that reason, i put most politicians and all global warming activists on an intellectual evolutionary scale a degree and a half below the trillobite.